Hydroplate Theory

The Hydroplate Theory of the Great Flood is the theoretical model, proposed by Dr. Walt Brown, to explain the original composition of the Earth, how the Great Flood occurred, and how the Flood changed the earth to its present configuration. Dr. Brown explains his theory in detail in his on-line book, In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood.[1]

Contents

Observations to explain

The Hydroplate Theory seeks to explain a number of observations, both Biblical and extra-Biblical. The Biblical explanations are found in Genesis chapters 6-8: a rupture of deep-underground springs (Hebrewכל-מעינת תהום or khal-mayanah tahown, translated as "fountains of the great deep" in the KJV), a torrential rainfall lasting for forty days and nights, water covering the highest elevations then existing to a depth of more than twenty-five feet (fifteen long cubits), and all this water covering the surface for 150 days and then receding, almost as if they had never been. The extra-Biblical explanations include:

The fitting-together of the continents of the earth like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle.

The outlines of the Mid-Oceanic Ridge system, especially the Mid-Atlantic Ridge that parallels the shores of the Americas to the west and Europe and Africa to the east.

The findings of sedimentary rock and even marine fossils at the highest elevations.

Basic elements

The one basic element of the Hydroplate Theory is a model of the antediluvian earth. According to this model, the earth had a subcrustal ocean. This is similar to the subglacial oceans on three of the Galilean moons of Jupiter, and on Enceladus, moon of Saturn.

This ocean was in a sealed chamber with multiple pillars holding up the earth's crust overhead. Recent evidence suggests this subcrustal chamber lay fifty miles beneath the surface of the earth.

Beginning with the Fall of Man, these pillars began to buckle, slowly at first, then somewhat faster. This buckling caused some parts of the crust to begin to settle, and this uneven settling created tensile stresses in the parts of the crust that did not settle. (Or else some person or persons unknown, set off a powerful but non-nuclear explosion over a pillar. This weakened it, with disastrous results long after the first event. We may never know. Noah, the great shipwright and Annalist, records only that he had one hundred twenty years' advance warning.)

Eventually the crust failed catastrophically, creating a seam at what is now the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. This seam continued to break open until at length all of that water, previously confined under pressure, burst through to the surface. The crust was then ruptured, forming various crustal plates, or hydroplates, that moved about or were shoved violently aside or into one another. This movement generated a great deal of heat, at levels that persist today under the earth.

Part of the subcrustal ocean survived. A vast reservoir of water, comparable in volume to the Arctic Ocean, exists under the Asian continent. It is known as the Beijing Anomaly.

Sequence of events

The catastrophic failure began, as mentioned, at what is now the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where the Americas once were joined with the rest of the continents in one continuous land mass. A tiny through-and-through crack appeared, and once this happened, it inevitably lengthened and broadened as the confined water burst through it. Eventually a seam opened nearly all the way around the earth, involving the entire Mid-Oceanic Ridge system.

Most of the water thus released washed over all the land areas in a series of incredibly high and fast tsunamis. These great waves lifted up Noah's Ark and carried it with them. That the Ark, or indeed any vessel, could survive this event is a tribute to the Ark's divine design and to Noah's innate skill as a shipwright.

In addition, this water created a cascade that arced very high in the atmosphere and fell as rain, for forty days and nights, as the Bible says. This water would reach very high indeed, not only because it had been confined under pressure, but also because the ten-mile-thick crustal plates would "flap" with the water's passage and create pumping action and "water hammer" to drive the water even higher. Brown estimates that one percent of this water, together with vast quantities of mud and rock, achieved escape speed and persists today as comets, asteroids, meteoroids, and the ice deposits that have already been demonstrated on the Moon, the planetMercury, and most recently on the planetMars.

In addition, some of the ejected material bombarded the Moon and created many of its present features. But they need not have bombarded the Moon immediately after ejection. Russell Humphreys' magnetic-field model, combined with findings from samples returned by the crews of Apollo 15 and Apollo 16, suggest that the Moon was bombarded on two other occasions, neither of which coincided with the Flood. More likely: some of the ejecta formed at least two companion asteroids: Asteroid 3753 Cruithne, and another, perhaps larger object. And object which, unlike Cruithne, flew in an orbit coincident with the plane of the ecliptic, instead of significantly inclined from it. That object then passed too close to the Moon and broke apart. Many of the fragments then struck the Moon on one face, creating the lunar "maria" and locking that hemisphere of the Moon to face the Earth permanently. In addition, two or more fragments of this companion asteroid struck the Earth. One might in fact have made the Arizona Meteor Crater. The impacts threw up enough dust to shade some of the lands of the Eastern Hemisphere and disrupt the rain patterns over the sources of the two major tributaries to the Nile River. If that disruption lasted for seven years, we now have the cause of the Biblical Famine in Egypt.

Some organic matter (which undoubtedly even included whole fish and dolphins) must also have been ejected, and indeed organic matter was found in the frozen polar craters on Mercury. Many of the comets incorporated more of this organic matter. Some comets (like Comet Hartley 2) emit cyanide gas, a product of bacterial metabolism, to this day. More to the point, the dwarf planetPluto has a frozen lake of carbon monoxide in the western part of its now most famous continuous plain. Carbon monoxide almost certainly came from a wood fire burning in a confined space. That fire could have burned in the core of Pluto, after the heat of accretion started it.

Directly opposite the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, depressions formed. These persist today as the Mariannas Trench and especially the Challenger Depth, two of the deepest places in all the earth's oceans.

Radioactive materials

The breaking of the crust, and the out-rushing of the subcrustal ocean, produced earthquakes the like of which had not occurred before and will never occur again. These earthquakes, acting on quartz distributed liberally but unevenly throughout the earth's crust, created electromotive potentials high enough to ionize atomic nuclei completely and to break down the natural resistance of these nuclei to fuse. Heavy-elemental nuclides fused to form super-heavy elements. These then decomposed, by a combination of fission and cluster decay, to produce uranium, thorium, and radiocarbon. Uranium and thorium were subject to accelerated decay and produced the rest of the trans-lead elements we know today. (The heaviest isotope of uranium might also have decayed, in the wild, through a two-step beta-decay pathway to produce neptunium and plutonium.)

This process released a "tsunami" of neutrons that flowed in all directions. The subcrustal ocean absorbed most of these neutrons. The subcrustal waters that escaped, persist as cometary ices that are known to have twice (or more!) of the concentration of deuterium one finds in the oceans of earth. Other crustal elements absorbed the remaining neutrons, to form the heavy (and in some cases, radioactive) isotopes of lead and lighter elements.

Radiocarbon presents a special case. The above process more than doubled the amount of radiocarbon in the atmosphere. In addition, the Great Flood itself sequestered significant portions of the earth's carbon stores. (Today, the "carbon age" of most fossil fuel deposits turns out to be "indefinite" or "infinite.") Post-Flood plants took up this radiocarbon. Any such plants, and any animals that ate their seeds, fruits, and vegetables, also took up this radiocarbon. They also took up heavy isotopes of key elements found in proteins, vitamins, and other nutrients. With two untoward results:

Any protein or other large molecule could degenerate any time from the sudden decay of an atom of radiocarbon to nitrogen.

Proteins might not "conform" properly because some of the atoms in their secondary structures (alpha-helices and beta-pleated sheets) were too heavy.

Either change can devastate any protein. And if that protein is an enzyme, the results can "ripple" from that in ways no physician can predict.

Result: the lifespan of humankind fell ninety percent in eleven generations, as per the Annals of Terah.

Dr. Brown has proposed a test: build a greenhouse having no radiocarbon in its air, and no heavy isotopes in its soil. Grow a vegetable and tomato garden. Raise small animals, probably rodents (including rats, mice, and rabbits) on a diet drawn exclusively from this garden. Then measure how long they live, compared to a control group that eats conventional foodstuffs.

Date of the Great Flood

Two of the comets, Halley and Swift-Tuttle, have orbits that usually carry them far away from any interfering bodies. Statistical backtracking of them establishes that both would have been most likely to be at perihelion at the same time, in the year 3290 BC or as much as one hundred years earlier or later. According to the Hydroplate Theory, this, then, would be the date of their launch, therefore of the Great Flood. This has profound implications for Biblical chronology.